Category Archives: Retail

This month’s Startup VIC pitch night on FinTech was a curtain raiser for the annual Intersekt conference. Sponsored by Square and FinTech Australia, it was hosted at the Victorian Innovation Hub, and MC’d by Finch’s Shahirah Gardner and Melissa Mack, Head of Community at MoneyPlace and a Director of FinTech Australia.

i=Change allows retailers and brands to “give back” to the causes their customers care about. Offering a “plug’n’play” solution for their clients, i=Change claims to have 60 brands on board already. It’s fair to say the target audience is fashion-conscience women, with an emphasis on charities, campaigns and causes that are primarily supporting the lives of women and children. Which is all good. But would it be churlish to suggest that many of the brands and products (and their associated imagery) might not be accessible to women in many of the countries where these projects operate? So, there is a potential disconnect between products and causes….

Nevertheless, as well as the feel-good factor for consumers, i=Change also claims to be reducing the retailers’ problem of abandoned online shopping carts, as the prospect of being able to donate to one of the selected causes leads to greater sales conversion and completion.

i=Change applies a fixed transaction fee on top of the customer donation, with a 30% tax rebate available to participating brands. After 5 years, i=Change is generating $8k per month in transaction fees, and is currently seeking a capital raise of $1m.

The judges were keen to understand the level of transparency under which i=Change operates, and whether in-store options are available (not just on-line retail).

For me, I can’t help thinking that this is an attempt to salve the conscience of certain parts of the fashion industry. I would also be interested to understand how much screening there is of both retailers and causes, against CSR measures or other relevant criteria.

Under the product brands of tradeDOX and xpertDOX, Lucidity is digitizing trade finance operations, particularly for import/export commodities transactions.

Offering a pay-per-transaction model, a subscription service, or a custom solution, Lucidity is still pre-revenue, having raised $50k in seed funding. Claiming to be streamlining and automating much of the paper document and manual processes still in use in much of the trade finance industry, it was not clear what technology they are using, nor the average transaction size they are processing. I also couldn’t help thinking that Blockchain solutions for supply chain, logistics and export/import financing will likely render Lucidity redundant.

CoinBot is an algo trading solution for cryptocurrencies that tokenizes individual trading strategies designed by the platform users, and fuelled by native SIT coins (Strategy Instance Tokens). The coins are used to pay for “prospecting” (i.e., scanning for unique trading signals), strategy (devising trading models) and exchange fees (to cover the cost of execution).

Currently seeking to raise $3m for 14% equity (plus SIT tokens), CoinBot supports strategy back-testing written to the Blockchain, and essentially allows users to avoid things like slippage by spreading the timing of instances over a defined trading period.

Personifi is a data-driven marketplace for personal loans. It matches consumers with the most suitable lenders (across 30 brands on their platform).

What is supposed to make Personifi different to traditional brokers, lenders and comparison sites is the level of personalised advice, and its credit decision criteria.

With accreditation for the new open banking data regime and the new comprehensive credit reporting system. Personifi can offer improved interest rate options. It has to be noted that some of the loan providers on their platform may once have been considered “lenders of last resort” – not pay-day lenders, but certainly providers who service borrowers who have been turned down by banks and other primary lenders. So, the quality of the loan origination and the standards for lending will no doubt be critical to success.

Previously known as compeer.com.au, Personifi continues to test the broker market, and is bringing more transparency on its fees and loan T&C’s. Current revenue model is based on a 2% commission for referrals. Having pivoted from P2P lending, Personifi is targeting millennials who lack either a long or a strong credit history.

On the night, i=Change took out both the Judges’ prize, and the People’s choice.

A few observations about these pitch nights. First, I miss the audience Q&A that used to be an integral part of proceedings – if part of Startup VIC’s remit (and I am a long-standing, paid-up member) is to foster better founders, there is a missed learning opportunity for prospective and current founders if there are no questions from the audience. Second, I wish they could fix the PA problems – I had thought this had been sorted by using this new(ish), state of the art venue? Finally, it seems the pitch rules have changed, as one of tonight’s teams managed to sneak in a live product demo during their pitch – I just hope that every contestant was afforded the same opportunity, and if this is going to become a regular feature, then the organisers need to be more observant of the time limits…

As with the same event last year, this pitch night was again hosted at the Kensington Clik Collective. Going by the audience numbers, the retail tech and e-commerce start-up sector continues to generate widespread interest, despite (or because of?) the fragile state of most bricks and mortar retailing in Australia, and the onslaught of global online shopping from the likes of Amazon and eBay.

According to the founder, it all started with a scarf… and how he might have paid more for the item at the time he wanted it (but less than the retail price), compared to the eventual discount price a few months later. If only he had been able to bargain on the spot. Enter barQode – a location-specific app that enables customers to make an offer on an in-store item, and retailers to match or counter the customer offer.

To be clear, this is not (yet) a price comparison tool or even an on-line platform – it’s an app aimed at specific, location-defined, in-store purchases.

While simple in concept, the app does require a huge behaviour change by shoppers. Australians are infamous for being “price sensitive” buyers (not the same as being “cheap”, as one retail consultant once corrected me). Cost plays a huge role in purchasing decisions, especially as choice is often limited in a sector dominated by an oligopoly of brands, and a traditionally restricted market in terms of parallel imports and geo-blocking.

But barQode requires Australians to get comfortable with the notion of haggling, and that is quite a culture shift. Yes, some retail brands offer price matching against their competitors, but as this pitch pointed out, this is all about in-store purchases and prompting a more emotional engagement.

Most of the questions from the panel of judges focused on the competition, customer acquisition and market entry. Using a combination of platform fees and analytics services, barQode claims to be cheaper than the competing platforms, which also risk dis-intermediating retailers from their direct customers. Costs of acquisition were not disclosed, since the app is only in very select beta. The founders appear to be targeting discount retailers rather than selecting a specific category launch. This raises the prospect of only attracting bargain hunters who are already tempted by stock clearance offers (a race to the bottom?) – rather than engaging with select brands who can afford to yield some margin while potentially securing a new customer base.

The team claim to have a patent pending (they are working on image recognition, rather than simply relying on bar codes and other inventory data), and is seeking $350k in seed funding prior to a $1.5m Series A.

I have seen this start-up pitch couple of times before, where the initial emphasis was on being a new kind of dating service. But now, presumably with more experience and more market research, it claims to be addressing the “loneliness epidemic” – despite all the so-called “connections” people have via social media (and given recent events at Facebook, how much longer will that particular trend run?) there is actually less and less personal engagement in the world.

According to data cited by the founders, in Australia, 35% of households consist of single people, a figure expected to reach 60% by 2036. At the same time, single people (neither age nor other demographics were defined) each spend an average of $12,000 a year on social activities. (It would have been interesting to see a breakdown of this spending pattern by consumer category, season, age, gender and location?)

The business model relies on a mix of subscriptions, commissions and affiliate fees, via a business partner model, member fees and booking fees. The founders are looking to raise $1.5m, primarily to fund marketing costs, as customer acquisition has mostly been organic, word of mouth, and SEO. To help them on their journey, the founders have appointed a solid advisory board, in their quest to counter the “fast food culture of dating and matching apps”.

Winery Lane is a curated online market place, servicing independent wineries. Currently engaged on an equity crowd funding program (to raise $900k in return for 18% equity), the founders suggest that the $7.5b wine industry suffers from too many brands. A few large names dominate the market (by supply and by retail consumption), and a long-tail of boutique and specialist wine makers struggle for recognition (even though they often have a superior product). The biggest challenge is: producers can’t control the end distribution, especially small producers.

Winery Land has identified three core personas of wine lovers: geek, aspirational, and seeker. Their goal is to connect independent wine makers with this target audience, by removing the risk for sellers – through enabling them to share their wine-making narratives, and only charging a success-based commission on sales.

The business model is to target 50-60 independent wineries, and charge a 30% sales commission, while offering a 20% discount to customers on 12 or more bottles.

Asked by the panel (which included a representative from Vinomofo) about potential competitor Naked Wine, the founders claim they operate in different segments – in particular, their focus on selling genuine wines (and not running private labels).

Behind the platform is a data acquisition component – by “pooling” their mailing lists, participating wine makers can actually reach a larger (pre-qualified) audience. The judges felt that marketplace models for wine are still to be proven, and wine makers are naturally very protective of their customer lists, to whom they can usually pre-sell their normally small vintages.

[As a piece of random market research, the next day I spoke to one wine-seller representing a boutique producer at a pop-up market in the lobby of a CBD office building. He claimed that by participating in a growing number of these pop-up markets around Melbourne over the past 12 months, he had increased the size of their customer list 10-fold. When I asked whether his sales and marketing strategy included using platforms such as Naked Wine, his opinion was these services were often more like marketing software. They may also require producers to discount too heavily, that they resemble something of a bulk distribution model, and that it was akin to a “pay to publish” model for wine makers – based on the cost of getting stock on to the inventory. And while it isn’t perfect, MailChimp was good enough tool for building, engaging with and growing their customer lists.]

This SME marketing platform highlights a major paradox: small brands engage better than big brands, but social media and e-mail engagement are both declining.

Using Instagram-based campaigns, Postie has doubled average campaign engagement to around 42%, and tripled typical click-thru rates to 6%. Postie has also reduced the time to create a campaign from 5 hours to 8 minutes.

While there is some template flexibility, there are limited options, as Postie draws on the Instagram design aesthetic.

According to the founders, there are 15 million brands on MailChimp, and 8 million brands on Instagram. What makes Postie different is that it owns its e-mail campaign client, and brands get to control their own retail inventory management.

Despite some of the challenges in SaaS marketing solutions, Postie has seen success with some specific verticals such as hairdressing, but admits that is hasn’t quite got the right product-market fit. As a result, and as a means to scale growth, Postie is starting to train users, to become more of a self-serve solution.

Somewhat surprisingly, the judges voted Epic Catch the winning pitch – I guess it is hard to ignore the founder passion, and the decision to pivot away from being a “traditional” dating platform. Meanwhile, the people’s choice (based on Twitter votes) was for Postie, and by a large margin – I suspect because many start-up founders, entrepreneurs and SME owners in the audience would welcome such a service for their own business.